Comma Separated JSON: CSJ.NET

It’s an interesting concept to dodge many of the ambiguities involved in
raw CSV files, while maintaining the benefit that a parser can work line
by line instead of having to load a 10GB file into memory.

Some of the benfits over typical CSV implementations are that it:

Defines a date format

Allows a null literal that won’t get parsed as the string "null".

null also removes the ambiguity with empty cells: is ,, supposed
to be an empty string or a null value?

New lines and other characters are escaped according to JSON encoding
rules instead of whatever the CSV implementer feels like doing

embedded arrays or objects inside of a cell

It’s a simple enough format that you can build a serializer and
deserializer out of existing JSON libraries in just a few minutes.

I’ve created (what I think is) the first .NET implementation of CSJ on
Github. It’s not quite done yet,
though version 0.0.1 is on Nuget.

I don’t know if CSJ will ever become a widespread format, but I do think
its intriguing. If you only use simple types (string, number, bool) then
its output is largely backwards compatible with existing CSV readers.